https://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

Given enough time (... a surprisingly short amount) and enough people creating art (say, about as many as we have had for the last couple hundred years) and indefinitely-long-lived recording, plus very-long copyright terms, the inevitable result is that it's functionally impossible to create anything within the space of "things people like" that's not violating copyright, for any but the strictest definitions of what constitutes copying.

The short story treats of music, but it's easy to see how visual arts and fiction-writing and the rest get at least extremely crowded in short order under those circumstances.